Horror month, #2: The Terminator, directed by James Cameron

This little low-budget jewel does a lot of things right, and one of them is a matter of semiotics. Semiotics is the study of signs, broadly speaking: anything where there's a signifier (like the words "this leaf") and a signified (like this leaf I want you to see). It's the discipline devoted to symbols and signals. One of the ways horror stories often fail is that there's inconsistency at the semiotic level—what we're told is good, bad, tough, easy, whatever doesn't seem to match up with what the characters actually do or how the world acts around them. Threats get over-sold or under-sold or just plain misrepresented, and so things don't hang together. The real beauty of The Terminator includes this simple fact. When Sgt. Reese says the famous line...

Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

...he's telling the precise truth. That is an accurate description of the Terminator, and we see each clause of that declaration in action, right up until it's literally smashed to pieces. Cameron and co-writer Gail Ann Hurd deliver precisely what they promise. That's fairly rare in film making, and part of what makes the chills in this movie still work, decades and orders of magnitude in budgeting later.

Horror month, #3: The Dryco Chronicles, written by Jack Womack

This is a six-book series you may well never have heard of. Ambient, the first one, is a pretty straightforward cyberpunk-ish story of life in an economically collapsed US dominated by a few mega-corporations. Think of the very worst of the Great Depression in the US and Weimar Germany, magnify it, institutionalize it, throw in a lot of mutagens with the pollution, and you've pretty much got Ambient. It was noteworthy for there being a strongly gnostic-flavored counter-cultural religion among some outcast sub-communities, and a payoff involving the contents of the personal vault of Old Man Dryden that's just absolutely glorious. Half of the urban legendry of the latter 20th century has a place in there somewhere.

Things got more distinctive in Terraplane, the second book, set some years later. It brings in a second parallel world, ninety years behind the first and in some ways even worse off, with things like slavery never having been abolished in that version of the US. And it's got glorious language:

"Why aren't we knived?" Jake asked, shaking his contagion-free-stamped dinner packet. In his, as in ours, was but a napkin, spoon and fork with rounded tines. Said cutlery looked metal, felt plastic; was some unwarranted alliance of both, like that solid used in rocket-part production which always failed when most essentialed.

"Too handy in event of nondinner maneuvers," said Skuratov.

Keeping that up consistently is a tour de force all in its own right. Using it to tell a moving, rich story about people in two ruined societies trying to do something for the betterment of both is impressive as all get-out.

The third book, Heathern, is a chronological step backward, focusing on the life of the woman revered as a latter-day figure of divine mercy by the neo-gnostics of Ambient. It turns out...they were right. This isn't a hard-science-fiction sort of world at all, but one in which there really is a redemptive spirit that really is locked outside of the dark iron prison of the world, trying and failing to save us. The fourth, Elvissey, builds on that cosmological foundation, with schemers from the first world swiping the Elvis of the second to be a messiah figure of a different sort for them. As Lord Dunsany says in one of his pieces, "The tale is one of those that hath not a happy ending."

The fifth book, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, may be the crown jewel of the lot. It's chronologically the earliest of the series, dealing with the onset of the age of constant crisis which characterizes DryCo and its world thereafter. It's told as the diary of a 12-year-old girl, and it's heartbreaking. She starts off life with no more worries than any child of successful professionals could expect to have, and by the end, it's all been taken away from her. It's one of the most profoundly personal apocalypses I know of.

The sixth book, Going Going Gone, is that rare beast, an actual climax and conclusion to the series which brings together all the plot threads left lying around and some hooks most readers won't have realized were any such thing. (Certainly I was caught off-guard repeatedly.) Both worlds are breaking down in their various ways, and time is short in which to do something...and something is done. It's a difficult redemption, but one that does justice to all that's come before.

Now, these are sold as science fiction and can certainly be read that way. (Yes, some people insist that any sf with religious truths other than rigorous atheism isn't really sf. These people are tiresome and shall not be given a fair hearing.) But they can be read as well as horror, since they are rich in dread, the unknown and unknowable, savagery, terror, the struggle to survive, all the emotions that go into horror. They are really, really worth your time.